VOSGES, a range of mountains in the NE. of France, since 1871 forming the Franco-German frontier by the inclusion of Alsace in German territory; they separate the basin of the Moselle from that of the Rhine.

VOSS, JOHANN HEINRICH, German poet and scholar, born in Mecklenburg; spent most of his life in Heidelberg; his fame rests chiefly on his idyllic poem “Luise” and his translations, particularly of Homer (1751-1826).

VOSSIUS, GERARD, Dutch philologist, born near Heidelberg; wrote a history of Pelagianism, which brought him disfavour with the orthodox; was made a prebendary of Canterbury through the influence of Laud; was, on some apology to orthodoxy in 1633, called to the chair of History in the Gymnasium of Amsterdam; he was a friend of Grotius; he fell from a ladder in his library, and was found dead (1577-1649).

VULCAN, the Roman god of fire and an artificer In metals, identified with the Greek HEPHAESTUS (q. v.); had a temple to his honour in early Rome; was fabled to have had a forge under Mount Etna, where he manufactured thunderbolts for Jupiter, the Cyclops being his workmen.

VULGATE, a version of the Bible in Latin executed by ST. JEROME (q. v.), and was in two centuries after its execution universally adopted in the Western Christian Church as authoritative for both faith and practice, and from the circumstance of its general reception it became known as the Vulgate (i. e. the commonly-accepted Bible of the Church), and it is the version accepted as authentic to-day by the Roman Catholic Church, under sanction of the Council of Trent.  “With the publication of it,” says Ruskin, “the great deed of fixing, in their ever since undisturbed harmony and majesty, the canon of Mosaic and Apostolic Scripture, was virtually accomplished, and the series of historic and didactic books which form our present Bible (including the Apocrypha) were established in and above the nascent thought of the noblest races of men living on the terrestrial globe, as a direct message to them from its Maker, containing whatever it was necessary for them to learn of His purposes towards them, and commanding, or advising, with divine authority and infallible wisdom, all that it was best for them to do and happiest to desire.  Thus, partly as a scholar’s exercise and partly as an old man’s recreation, the severity of the Latin language was softened, like Venetian crystal, by the variable fire of Hebrew thought, and the ‘Book of Books’ took the abiding form of which all the future art of the Western nations was to be an hourly expanding interpretation.”

VYASA, the mythical author of the Hindu Mahabharata and the Puranas; was the illegitimate child of a Brahman and a girl of impure caste of the fisher class.

W

WAAL, a S. branch of the Rhine, in Holland.

WACE, Anglo-Norman poet, born in Guernsey; author of two metrical chronicles, “Geste des Bretons” and “Roman de Rou,” the latter recording the fortunes of the dukes of Normandy down to 1106 (1120-1183).